The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to adaptable pilot ratios.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, or a New Radio (NR) system). A wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations or access network nodes, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
Transmissions between wireless devices are often affected by noisy channel conditions and interference. In such cases, pilots (e.g., reference signals) may be inserted into messages sent from a transmitter to a receiver, where the pilots are known signals that a receiver may use to perform channel estimation to aid in decoding received messages. However, in some cases, an optimal ratio of pilot resources to the total number of allocated resources for a message may vary for different transmission configurations.